Once in a Lifetime - Georgia in Vermont

by Margaret Michniewicz

Simple Beauty: Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe
Through October 31, 2006
Shelburne Museum,
Shelburne, Vermont

Popular misconceptions about Georgia O’Keeffe are that she just painted flowers, and painted them big; and later, still life compositions of bleached desert bones. Likewise, many people think of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, as just a photographer, famous for Pictorialist prints of New York’s Flatiron Building, and his fetishized shots of O’Keeffe’s disembodied nude anatomy.

Below: From the Lake, No. 3 (1924, Philidelphia Museum of Art), inspired
by the artist's summer vacations at Lake George. Also below: Turkey Feathers in Indian Pot (1935).

In reality, Stieglitz was a major force in early 20th century art, striving to have the United States surpass the Europeans in the visual culture vanguard – and not by beating them at their own game. Rather, by cultivating, in the select group of artists he championed, a specifically “American” art. In addition to his own work, his New York City ensemble included the painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and occasionally, Charles Demuth; colleague in photography Paul Strand; and, alone among the boys, the young woman from Wisconsin, Georgia O’Keeffe, whose paintings and striking appearance caught the older, married photographer’s eye.
Questions will perhaps always linger as to whether O’Keeffe would have made it without having attracted Stieglitz’s eye to her body, not just her body of work. This is not to say she did not earn and deserve notoriety as an artist – merely acknowledgement that, for all the mythology of the unconventional artistic universe, women pursuing artistic endeavors have historically remained subject to the laws of patriarchal gravity.

Another artist at work in New York City during this time was Florine Stettheimer, a painter who has remained largely unknown but who, though a generation or two older than her art associates, hung with Duchamp and was repeatedly invited to show in Stieglitz’s venues variously called “The Intimate Gallery” or “An American Place.” In her 1928 portrait of Stieglitz, Stettheimer depicted an imposing figure dominating his gallery, but also included multiple visual references to O’Keeffe: a dark spiral form cleverly camouflaged against the jet-black cape adorning the photographer; a painting hung on the wall that alludes to O’Keeffe’s paintings of Lake George and large dark red oak leaves and, the letters of O’Keeffe’s name written vertically on the wall, in reverse, as though in a mirror.

The only depiction of O’Keeffe herself is a barely visible sketch of the painter’s head in profile, lightly etched into the white paint on the gallery wall. As a friend and colleague of both artists, Stettheimer here portrays the importance of O’Keeffe in Stieglitz’s life and art – yet, as a woman artist herself, she is sensitive about refraining from yet another objectification of O’Keeffe’s body, and rather, emphasizes O’Keeffe’s work. (Indeed, Stettheimer went to great lengths never to be depicted by anyone else except herself, and then, only as an artist at work). When the two women were introduced, Stettheimer is reported to have wryly commented how she was pleased to see O’Keeffe “whole”, as she had only previously known her in “sections”, alluding to Stieglitz’s (at that time) notorious nude photographs of his young lover’s various body parts.

That O’Keeffe was more than just the sum of her body parts may be evidenced by the fact that her name is bandied about the household of later generations more than that of her husband’s, as is that of Frida versus Diego. The general public is now more familiar with an O’Keeffe than a Dove, Hartley, or Marin. To the snob set of art appreciation, O’Keeffe’s work is at times treated derisively, belittled for its legible appeal to the masses. The darlings of the critical set are more likely the complex Louise Bourgeois or Eva Hesse. In our world of mass media, with ubiquitous images of O’Keeffe flower folds on calendars and “inspirational” posters, it is all too easy to overlook the lovely individual trees for the mass-produced forest.

Simple Beauty is, however, a must-see for O’Keeffe aficionados, as well as those wishing to enhance their understanding of America’s art history. While the tendency has been, thanks to the propaganda of critics like Clement Greenberg, to hail the Abstract Expressionists (particularly the action painters like canvas cowboy Jackson Pollock) as the creators of the first truly American art, such gestures were preceded by earlier generations. As art historian Wanda Corn notes in her compelling exploration of early twentieth century art, The Great American Thing, the favorite terms of Stieglitz and his cadre were “American”, “soil”, and “spirit”.

As Strand explained it, the allegiance to the word “American” was an indication of these artists’ mission to cultivate homegrown modern art, not as evidence of the Stieglitz circle’s patriotism. “That something which we call America,” he wrote, “lies not so much in political institutions as in its rocks and skies and seas.”

And according to Corn, “American” in their lexicon meant, among other things, a sense of place and the best modern art produced in New York by artists who had detached themselves from Europe. Only O’Keeffe never had to detach herself; she was born in the U.S. and not prone to travel abroad like the others. Instead, she taught herself to drive and most likely derived many kicks from Route 66 as she and her women friends took cross-country road trips to the Southwest, for extended stretches of time, without Stieglitz.

In New Mexico, Corn points out, O’Keeffe found in 1929 a community of independent artistic and scholarly women so plentiful that the writer Jean Toomer was compelled to speak harshly of what he found to be home to “female fascism – strong resourceful women who like the starkness and the isolation of this country.”

Whether or not Stieglitz made it possible for O’Keeffe to launch a career in art, it was not too long before this painter, 23 years younger than her husband, struck out on her own in both life and her art. Simple Beauty – a deceiving title that unfortunately may reinforce the cynics’ presumptions about this artist – traces the first half of her career and provides a succinct presentation (a total of 25 paintings) of O’Keeffe’s pursuits on canvas from very early on, 1920, until 1952, 34 years prior to her death at age 99 in 1986.

Of this exhibition, nine are works on loan from private collections. This is, in all likelihood, the only opportunity most of us will ever have to see these particular paintings, in person or even, in some cases, in reproductions. O’Keeffe’s paintings are complemented by still-life paintings that presage her zoomed-in renderings of flowers and by examples of indigenous Southwestern pottery, from the Shelburne Museum’s permanent collection.

As innocuous as O’Keeffe’s flower paintings may be to cynical 21st century eyes, Corn reminds us that O’Keeffe was an “original” artist in an era when few women were able to even pursue art as a career, and even fewer dared to paint abstractly. O’Keeffe began doing the large flower paintings by 1924. As a subject, flowers were intimately associated with women and femininity in American culture. Thus, if floral paintings were what was expected of women, it is as if this artist was retorting, Okay, I’ll paint what I’m obliged to paint, but I’ll do it in a way you never expected; I’ll paint these flowers in such a way that you can’t ignore them – or me.

Corn points out that as early as 1922 O’Keeffe complained that critics generally, “sound so strange and far removed from what I feel of myself. They make me seem like some strange unearthly sort of creature floating in the air – breathing in clouds for nourishment – when the truth is that I like beef steak – and like it rare at that.”

This chafing at conforming to rules established for her is found again when O’Keeffe abruptly turned from these themes that so pleased Stieglitz and his obsession with “spirit”, “soil”, and specifically for her, the “feminine” aspects of nature. She deliberately started to pursue work that she knew would irk her man – cityscapes of New York and its skyscrapers and manmade vistas. She wrote in 1927 that she wanted her next exhibition “to be so magnificently vulgar that all the people who have liked what I have been doing would stop speaking to me.” Vulgar to the Stieglitz crowd was not, as one might think, raunchy nightlife and seedy characters, but rather, whatever was not nature in all its purity.

Works such as East River, No. 1, are direct acts of defiance by O’Keeffe of her older husband. Corn cites this transition in 1925 to painting New York cityscapes as a visible demonstration of O’Keeffe’s desire to make changes in her life, knowing full well that Stieglitz would frown on her taking on such a masculine subject. “Stieglitz’s hostility to O’Keeffe’s trying her hand at the subject had no effect, except, perhaps, as something to work against,” Corn writes.

O’Keeffe did New York City works from 1925-1930, and then dropped it as a subject abruptly, moving on to portrayals of New Mexico landscapes and the visual treasures she found there. “I never feel at home in the East like I do out here,” she said while on her first trip to the southwest. “I feel like myself – and I like it.”

She began to delve into works that depicted the bleached bones of iconic Southwest creatures, even while her home address was in New York. Again, these are images that have become so ubiquitous that there is an unfortunate degree of kitsch difficult to shake out of our postmodern gaze. But O’Keeffe was an artist, and her renderings of a steer’s skull on canvas, for example, are simultaneously a virtuoso execution of perspective and tricks of the eye that manipulate unsuspecting viewers in ways they might never know.
And as a savvy and sly woman artist, Georgia O’Keeffe threw them for a loop back home with these bone paintings. Paraphrasing Corn, the flower paintings heave and breathe, and inspired critics to read them as flowing from a woman’s womb. In New Mexico, however, O’Keeffe consciously worked to change the paradigm from woman painter to regional painter. She exchanged fleshiness for dryness and hardness; hills and valleys for stony cliffs and deep, dark crevices; fluid forms for strong iconic statements.
Such associations with men’s activities made O’Keeffe’s appropriation of the objects all the more audacious, and confusing to her critics. The critics back in New York didn’t know how to read the bone paintings – they couldn’t reconcile them in a gendered way.

The complexity of Georgia O’Keeffe – the woman and the artist – is belied by the title “Simple Beauty”. It is, however, an easily accessible collection of lovely steppingstones to remind us why she was a pivotal figure in Stieglitz’s American Place and beyond.

For more information, visit www.shelburnemuseum.org or call (802) 985-3346.

Vermont Woman editor Margaret Michniewicz teaches courses in art history, specializing in gendered readings of visual culture.